davel

The mortgage tax advantage is just one component of it.

After WWII we made (mostly suburban) homes be retirement investment vehicles for (almost exclusively white) working class people. That was a terrible choice for all future generations of the working class. Now most people (white or not) are priced out. It’s been great for the boomers and the real estate & finance industries, though, thanks to asset price inflation.

From Michael Hudson’s Killing the Host (PDF):

The Bubble Economy vs classical industrial growth

The stock market is not the largest part of the economy whose prices are inflated by bank credit. As the biggest asset category, real estate is by far the largest market for debt. The Federal Reserve’s quarterly Flow of Funds statistics show that by 2007-08, about 80 percent of new bank loans were real estate mortgages. Most such loans are to buy property already in place, just as most stock market transactions are for shares long since issued.

The effect is twofold: it inflates asset prices ranging from real estate to entire companies, and yields banks interest that imposes a carrying charge on buyers. That is what makes bubble economies high-cost. Housing prices are inflated, requiring mortgage debtors to pay more. Companies borrow to buy other companies, increasing the volume of corporate debt simply to finance ownership changes. And education is financialized, enabling students to afford higher tuition costs by committing to pay monthly debt service out of what they earn after they graduate.

The resulting financial overhead consists of claims on the economy’s actual means of production. Yet most people think of these bonds, bank loans and stocks and creditor claims as wealth, not its antithesis on the debit side of the balance sheet. This inside-out doublethink is a precondition for the bubble economy to be applauded by the mass media, keeping its corrosive momentum expanding.

From the corporate sphere and real estate to personal budgets, the distinguishing feature over the past half-century has been the rise in debt/ equity and debt/income ratios. Just as debt leveraging has hiked corporate break-even costs of doing business, so the cost of living has been increased as homes and office buildings have been bid up on mortgage credit. “Creating wealth” in a debt-financed way makes economies high-cost, exacerbated by the tax shift onto labor and consumers instead of capital gains and “free lunch” rent. These financial and fiscal policies have enabled financial managers to siphon off the industrial profits that were expected to fund capital formation to increase productivity and living standards.

Thanks, it has pockets!

I swear you are like a box of chocolates, Cablemonster. You contain multitudes.

I decided to never own a car again, and that was the tiebreaker.

Firstly, you lumped anti-imperialist—and until recently imperialized—Russia and China in with the imperialist USA. The Chinese went through a century of humiliation under British colonialism, and the Russian people went through a cold war followed by neocolonial “shock therapy” from the US.

Secondly, the UN is incapable of doing any such thing, and the countries don’t need or want its patronizing. Your Western chauvinism is showing when you think these are backwards people who need to be administered by others. What they need is for the Global North imperialist states to stop pillaging them.

Thirdly, calling one of your own instance’s admins a fucking knob is a bold move.

Edit to add: It looks like you’ve been a PITA for mods & admins: https://lemmy.ml/modlog?page=1&userId=1589893

I think CableMonster might be in the neoclassical economics camp, which insists that “inflation” is definitionally “money creation,” that they’re essentially synonyms. They refuse to entertain any other possible explanations for a rise in prices, and that’s why price gouging can’t be a component of inflation and therefore must be a boogeyman.

Yeah why do these countries keep being unstable? Nobody knows 🤷

• A map of every country Britain has ever invaded
• List of wars involving the United Kingdom
• List of Atrocities committed by US authorities
• A Detailed Chronological List of US Interventions, Invasions, Destabilzations, and Assistance to Oppressive Regimes (ending in 2002)
• Shock therapy (economics)
• The blueprint of regime change operations How regime change happens in the 21st century with your consent
• Are We The Baddies?
• Michael Parenti: Africa is Rich

@xor@infosec.pub 😂

Reporter: [REDACTED]
Reason: Spam or Abuse

It seems that sea lion has come up a few times with your young account. Maybe it’s a crybully tactic; maybe it’s projection? https://infosec.pub/search?creatorId=6470527&q=sea+lion

Your modlog isn’t a pretty picture for such a young account, either: https://infosec.pub/modlog/userId=

Banned @xor from the community memes@lemmy.world
reason: Abusing the Reporting system - 3 day ban

half of the “people”

Why are people in quotes? Because you mean bots, meaning paid shills and/or software “arguing disingenuously,” and not regular people posting earnestly/organically.

if their only political opinion is about how bad biden really is… and they never talk about trump, russia or ukraine… then it’s a duck

What “duck” are you alluding to? Russian bots.

They’re all related to your BlueAnon conspiracy theory about Russian bots, which you didn’t explicitly state but clearly meant to imply.

Are these bots in the room with us now? https://lemmy.ml/comment/9279492

• IT Pro: Cambridge Analytica models were exaggerated and ineffective, [UK Information Commissioner’s Office] claims
• Wall Street Journal: Mueller Doesn’t Find Trump Campaign Conspired With Russia
• Jacobin: Democrats and Mainstream Media Were the Real Kremlin Assets
• Washington Post: FEC fines DNC, Clinton for violating rules in funding Steele dossier
• Washington Post: Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters
• Jacobin: It Turns Out Hillary Clinton, Not Russian Bots, Lost the 2016 Election
• Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork
• Jacobin: Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal On the Left, there’s been a temptation to dismiss the revelations about Twitter’s internal censorship system that have emerged from the so-called Twitter Files project. But that would be a mistake: the news is important and the details are alarming.
• MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
• Jeff Gerth at Columbia Journalism Review on Russiagate: Editor's Note | Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four
• Matt Taibbi: WMD, Part II: CIA "Cooked The Intelligence" To Hide That Russia Favored Clinton, Not Trump In 2016
• Chris Hedges: Why Russiagate Won’t Go Away